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Georgia Tech Cybersecurity News Releases

Official announcements from the Georgia Institute of Technology, regarding cybersecurity research, support, faculty and facilities are listed here. For more news from all areas of Georgia Tech, please visit the campus News Center. For official announcements from the Georgia Tech Research Institute -- Georgia's Tech applied research arm for industry and government clients -- please visit the GTRI Newsroom.

Cybersecurity researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have been awarded a $12.8 million contract to develop fundamentally new techniques designed to dramatically accelerate the detection and remediation of infections in local and remote networks.

Two Ph.D. students from the School of Computer Science took home the Grand Prize and 1st Place - Commercialization Track in the 2017-18 IISP Cybersecurity Demo Day Finale for a solution to help mobile app developers avoid using malicious open-source code in their designs.

Georgia Tech graduate studentsIshan Mehta and Taimour Wehbe were selected as "RSA Security Scholars" and will attend the 2018 RSA Conference in San Francisco at the courtesy of RSA. Georgia Tech was one of just 30 universities nationwide invited to send students to one of industry's largest annual events. Universities were invited based upon the strength of their cybersecurity programs.

A new login authentication approach by researchers at Georgia Tech's College of Computing could improve the security of current biometric techniques that rely on video or images of users’ faces. Known as Real-Time Captcha, the technique uses a unique challenge that’s easy for humans — but difficult for attackers who may be using machine learning and image generation software to spoof legitimate users.

Researchers from Georgia Tech and Stony Brook University conducted what is believed to be the first large-scale, empirical study of combosquatting -- the practice of tricking consumers into visiting website domains that contain familiar trademarks but lead to malicious websites. The work was supported by U.S. Department of Defense agencies, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

A new software system being developed by cybersecurity researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology will largely automate that process, allowing investigators to quickly and accurately pinpoint how intruders entered the network, what data they took and which computer systems were compromised.

Is the ability to identify a cyber attacker good and getting better? At the Georgia Institute of Technology on Wednesday, Stewart A. Baker, the first assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, proposed that 2017 might just be a transformational moment in the quest for better cyber attribution.

Michael Farrell, Ph.D. and chief strategist of the Cybersecurity Information Protection and Hardware Evaluation Research (CIPHER) Lab, has assumed the role of co-director of the Institute for Information Security & Privacy (IISP) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Farrell takes over for Bo Rotoloni, who helped establish the IISP in 2015 and recently was appointed director of Finance & Research Administration at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI).

Additive manufacturing, also known as 3-D printing, is replacing conventional fabrication processes in critical areas ranging from aerospace components to medical implants. But because the process relies on software to control the 3-D printer, additive manufacturing could become a target for malicious attacks – as well as for unscrupulous operators who may cut corners.

A new vulnerability affecting Android mobile devices results not from a traditional bug, but from the malicious combination of two legitimate permissions that power desirable and commonly-used features in popular apps.

By analyzing network traffic going to suspicious domains, security administrators could detect malware infections weeks or even months before they're able to capture a sample of the invading malware, a new study suggests. The findings point toward the need for new malware-independent detection strategies.

ECE Assistant Professor Manos Antonakakis will serve as a panelist at the CableLabs Inform(ED) IoT Security Conference, part of a two-day conference event that will be held April 12-13, 2017 in New York City, New York.

Students from the Georgia Institute of Technology placed first in the National Security Agency (NSA)’s “2016 Codebreaker Challenge,” beating 480 other universities in a three-month hacking contest designed to give students a realistic glimpse of nation-state cybersecurity.

The School of Electrical & Computer Engineering simulated a ransomware takeover of a water treatment plant in order to highlight vulnerabilities in control systems such as manufacturing plants, water and wastewater treatment facilities, and building management systems. The work was presented at the 2017 RSA® Conference.

Attending the RSA® Conference (RSAC) is a coveted, career-climbing, right-of-passage for professionals in the cybersecurity field, and next week, three Georgia Tech students will be honored as “RSA®C Security Scholars” before an expected crowd of 40,000 in San Francisco.

Since launching in 2014, the Center for the Development and Application of Internet of things Technologies (CDAIT) has grown from three founding members to 18 and was named one of the best IoT blogs/websites by the Internet of More Things for providing “informative analysis.”

In an era of fake news from questionable outlets, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have built a language model that identifies which words and phrases lead to strong or weak perceived levels of credibility during rapidly unfolding events on social media.

A new mentorship-driven accelerator and venture fund targeting high-tech startups is coming to Atlanta. The national program, called Engage, launched through a joint announcement from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, and the CEOs of 10 leading global corporations.

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) announced Dec. 19 that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Georgia Institute of Technology to begin collaborating on advancing the Internet of Things (IoT) and fostering innovation through an IoT ecosystem.

Annie Antón, professor and chair of the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing, served on the Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. The commission issued its consensus report on Dec. 2.

The Georgia Institute of Technology has been awarded a $17.3 million cybersecurity research contract to help establish new science around the ability to quickly, objectively and positively identify the virtual actors responsible for cyberattacks, a technique known as "attribution."

Students invited to apply for cyber scholarship and new fellowship

The Institute for Information Security & Privacy at Georgia Tech announced a $5-million scholarship fund and the creation of a new Ph.D. fellowship program dedicated to emerging cybersecurity ideas. Both efforts support students who want to pursue cybersecurity careers and research.

A $1.5 million gift from Intel Corporation has established a new research center at the Georgia Institute of Technology dedicated to the emerging field of machine-learning (ML) cybersecurity with a focus on strengthening the analytics behind malware detection and threat analysis.

A study of 20 major cloud hosting services has found that as many as 10 percent of the repositories hosted by them had been compromised – with several hundred of the “buckets” actively providing malware. Such bad content could be challenging to find, however, because it can be rapidly assembled from stored components that individually may not appear to be malicious.

A $9.4 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) could lead to development of a new technique for wirelessly monitoring Internet of Things (IoT) devices for malicious software – without affecting the operation of the ubiquitous but low-power equipment.

Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have developed a flexible, generic data-fusion software that simplifies interacting with sensor networks. Known as FUSE, it provides a framework to standardize the diverse IoT world. Its application programming interface (API) lets users capture, store, annotate and transform any data coming from Internet-connected sources.

Researchers, students and faculty from the Georgia Institute of Technology present their latest cybersecurity advances at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, one of the information security community's premier international events. Three research papers by Georgia Tech researchers, students and faculty were accepted into the peer-reviewed conference, including a fourth in which a Georgia Tech student collaborated in a study led by Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

By detecting semantic inconsistencies in content, researchers -- led by Georgia Tech's Motorola Foundation Professor Raheem Beyah -- have developed a new technique for identifying promotional infections of websites operated by government and educational organizations. Such attacks use code embedded in highly-ranked sites to drive traffic to sketchy websites selling fake drugs, counterfeit handbags and plagiarized term papers – or installing drive-by malware.

Georgia Tech researchers led by Professor Ling Liu have been awarded a $1.19 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to devise privacy protection protocols for big data cloud computing throughout all phases of data processing in a project known as PrivacyGuard.

Georgia Tech researchers have been awarded a $2.9 million contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a cybersecurity method that will identify and defend against low-volume distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

President Barack Obama has selected Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing Chair and Professor Ana (Annie) Antón to serve as one of 12 members of the Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. The bipartisan commission, created by presidential executive order on Feb. 9, 2016, is part of the Cybersecurity National Action Plan.

A fraud detection system for healthcare claims… Ways to evaluate safer passwords…. Technical fixes for truly private browsing… These are some of the ideas proposed by Georgia Tech students who will compete before a national panel of venture capitalists for cash in the inaugural “Demo Day Finale” on April 13.

Researchers are using the same principle as human voice recognition to identify devices on electrical grid control networks, using their unique electronic “voices” – fingerprints produced by the devices’ individual physical characteristics – to determine which signals are legitimate and which signals might be from attackers. Georgia Tech's Motorola Foundation Professor Raheem Beyah explains.

The personal information of millions of smartphone users is at risk due to in-app advertising that can leak potentially sensitive user information between ad networks and mobile app developers, according to a new study by students at the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

January 28 was recognized as “National Data Privacy Day” and supported by the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Interactive Computing. Professors, researchers and scientists and Georgia Tech comment on data collection and privacy concerns.

Looking to share its advanced research on bot behavior, emerging infections and mitigation processes with the security community, the Georgia Institute of Technology is the first academic institution to join the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG). The Working Group bridges the gap between academia and industry to understand and disable complex aspects of information abuse, says Assistant Professor Manos Antonakakis.

In response to widespread and persistent cybersecurity threats to businesses, government and individuals, the Georgia Institute of Technology announces the formation of a new, interdisciplinary research collaborative – the Institute for Information Security & Privacy (IISP). The IISP aligns the expertise of 200 researchers and nine labs across four colleges and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) to form a single gateway to all cybersecurity efforts.

Attorney and Professor Peter Swire, who teaches in Scheller College of Business and leads the privacy policy research area for the Institute for Information Security & Privacy, explains the latest ruling about transfering user data between the U.S. and Europe.

Students and faculty from Georgia Tech's College of Computing achieved the highest honors at ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE ’15) held in Italy, Aug 30-Sept 7 -- one of two flagship software engineering conferences.

Researchers led by Professor Wenke Lee from the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing developed a new cyber security analysis method that discovered 11 previously unknown Internet browser security flaws, and were honored with the Internet Defense Prize, an award offered by Facebook in partnership with USENIX at the 24th USENIX Security Symposium.

Researchers from the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology were awarded $4.2 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to improve how data is tracked between computers, Internet hosts, and browsers for better cybersecurity.